The Unicorn Is Not Carnivorous
by DrWorm
Summary: [Death Note] L realizes that he will find no benevolent human beings on our great spaceship Earth.


Note: I think I've read up to chapter 34, which is when this is meant to take place, as far as I know.  
  
"Good Lord deliver us,/The Unicorn is not carnivorous!" - William Rose Benét, "How to Catch Unicorns"  
  
The Unicorn Is Not Carnivorous  
  
There is an old joke that goes: _Would you like to see me balance an elephant with one hand? You would? Then go out and find me an elephant with one hand!_  
  
Logically, there is no danger in keeping a fully tamed animal by one's side at all times; the trick, as in the joke about the elephant, is in finding the fully tamed animal. For no matter how placid or docile or dully domesticated a creature may seem, he retains within the reptilian crevasse of his gelatinous grey matter the capacity for violence worthy of a beast. It may never see the light of day, but it is there regardless. Even man, who nauseatingly refers to himself as 'civilized,' holds within his mind the animal of which he was borne. And he holds it poorly; as a lightweight stumbles over a glass or two of wine, man so easily becomes intoxicated by the smell of blood and the thrill of viciousness.  
  
There is something mildly distressing about waiting for Raito to be delivered unto him; not the anticipation, but the _wait_. The weight. Turning cheap and dirty tricks with words, that's what jokes are. A joke is a little lie and, oh, he hates liars. Lyres. The homophone irks him greatly, that stupendous offender of insinuating small confusions and timorous misdirections.  
  
He is waiting to be chained to another person, and that is distressing enough. Human beings make poor pets; and, anyway, his childhood kitten had been hit by an automobile and its brains had been ground into the asphalt by the grooves of the rubber tires. He knows that he will not be able to feed and water and ignore another human being. Raito will not be content to curl up beside his chair and lick crumbs from empty plates. What a pity, he thinks. What a pity, for such a fine pet he'd make, though never a tame pet.  
  
The only tame animal is one that is dead. He recalls the dusty feathers of barn owls with wings outspread, the false glitter of an aluminum foil pond guarded over by the sagging body of a fox forever poised to take a drink, and the hard, accusing glass eyes of the head of a deer with peeling antlers and posthumous mange. The buck's head and torso had been mounted above the old English fireplace, and he had come to the logical conclusion that it had somehow become stuck while sojourning on its journey through the walls; and yet, the thing's hindquarters did not emerge on the opposite side as expected. Where was its body? Gone, was the answer, severed and perhaps eaten long ago. But those replacement eyes still managed to hold a disconcerting air of ancestral dignity and menace, and so to this day he cannot stomach the thought of venison.  
  
He does not miss the pets that have died, nor the people who have gone away; he yearns, sometimes, for the tantalizing familiarity such entities offer when nostalgia dredges the pools of memory and he thinks paradise is found in the act of reliving. But he does not miss _them_ in any unique sense. Kittens can be replaced, and there is no shortage of people infesting the Earth. He wonders, however, whether he will miss Kira; or, rather, the sense of purpose Kira gives him. There are other purposes in the world, of course, and he is not naïve enough to think differently. But he will not be surprised if he finds himself in mourning after closing the Kira case; it would not be his first experience with such disquieting feelings, and he is sure he'd never be able to allow it to be his last.  
  
The glass cases of natural history museums enclosed careful and meticulous exhibits that would engage him for hours as he stood, transfixed, before their imposing false habitats and tried to imprint every detail in his memory. A fearsome lion felling a camel and the rider upon its back was forever suspended in that instant as larger-than-life casualties of a moment that would never end, that paralyzing second of fear before swift death overtook the weaker creatures. The towering, perforated structures of ancient dinosaur bones and smooth curves of mammoth tusks, and the humble, earthy skeletons of primitive man shared the vast common space and vied shamelessly for his continued attention. But it was a shelf of clay reconstructions and poorly preserved corpses that never failed to attract his curiosity; no matter how shoddy the display, he always studied it, diligently absorbing the same information over and over as he gingerly relaxed his worldview enough to allow himself to process such blatant contradictions. The Great Auk, the moa, the Passenger Pigeon, the Quagga, the Thylacine, and even the ubiquitous dodo all grazed upon false grasses and flapped their useless wings in their sedentary glass cages. The dinosaurs were extinct too, of course, as were the mastodons and saber-toothed cats; yet it was somehow easier to accept the annihilation of those larger-than-imagination creatures whose existence was never recorded by a literate human hand. They are real, of course, but in such an abstract way that he barely processes or cares about the nature of their reality.  
  
But the decaying remnants of species decimated, directly or indirectly, by humanity's influence induced a kind of paradoxical paranoia within him. He wanted to tell the world to look harder for these lost animals, to urge the cryptozoologists to go forth on his behalf and correct these widespread mistakes; surely it's not possible that every member of those names listed could have died without leaving behind some kind of posterity? Because, yes, they rediscovered the Aye-Aye and the Coelacanth and the Long-legged Warbler, so perhaps they may one day uncover a tame specimen of _homo__ sapiens_ living out-of-sight in the thickest of underbrush in the darkest of forests. And one day gentle men may freely walk the planet without fear.  
  
Recalling these thoughts from day-trips taken so early in his short life, he finds himself perilously close to wanting to agree with Kira. Yes, let us eliminate the criminal element, leaving behind only the docile and domesticated men who have been thoroughly lobotomized by civilization. Together, they could put into motion the most beneficial extinction the world has ever seen, with their own coupled suicide pact marking the climactic finish. Hostility and violence within the sentient would cross-breed into nothingness, and the pleasant monotony of Eden would be restored without the intervention of any god or higher power… only that of two higher minds possessing the foresight others never had.  
  
But something stubborn within him always intervenes. Is it ethics? Is it self-preservation? Is it a fear of the unknown, or even just the simple fear of being wrong? He can't say. Perhaps it all of this. Perhaps none.  
  
At his most cynical, he knows that the tame man is a myth. Like the gryphon, the pegasus, and the gorgon, gentle men are accessible only in imagination. They serve as metaphors, allegories, and dreams. And, like all dreams, their concept may one day fade. No self-righteous quest of right or wrong will make dreams any more true; like a search for the Holy Grail, it is a thing that is fruitless to pursue. Only the most holy and pure could ever look upon the cup of Christ, and only a virgin could attract the flawless unicorn. Tales preserved from ancient worlds describe an impossible menagerie of beasts and spirits reflecting the deepest and darkest of human wants and needs. The absurdity of the petty, foolish, greedy, and nasty human soul birthed existences a tame man could not begin to fathom. The human race traded peace and perfection for beauty and knowledge of a fundamentally flawed universe, and did so gladly.  
  
He is ninety-nine percent sure that Raito will not bite him, even when provoked. And, in all the world of wild and unpredictable men, he is only unequivocally afraid of that one percent.


End file.
